JERUSALEM, 6 August 2004 — Israel’s Defense Ministry agreed yesterday to a Palestinian Authority request to let some policemen carry guns on the streets, in order to help end unprecedented internal unrest, Israeli security sources said. Most members of Palestinian security forces in the West Bank stopped carrying weapons more than two years ago after some were killed in major incursions that Israel said were to root out militants involved in bombings and shooting attacks.
Israeli security sources said the Defense Ministry would only agree to the deployment of armed Palestinian Authority police in areas that were not seen as hotbeds of militancy. “All those policemen who will carry weapons will also have to be vetted by the Shin Bet,” one source said, referring to Israel’s internal security service.
Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters he had not heard official word from Israel on the issue of arming the police and was still awaiting a high-level security meeting between the two sides.
Palestinian-run areas of the Gaza Strip and West Bank have been gripped by unprecedented internal unrest since last month amid calls on veteran President Yasser Arafat to sack corrupt officials and reform a plethora of security forces.
Meanwhile, in an unrelated development, an explosion went off in the path of a car carrying a local leader of a Palestinian militant group in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday but without causing any casualties. The car was carrying Jamal Abu Samadana, the head of the military branch of the Popular Resistance Committee, an umbrella militant faction loosely linked to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction.
According to a statement by the group, Samadana was the target of “an assassination attempt by an Israeli helicopter,” but witnesses and an AFP photographer at the scene said no helicopters were flying overhead.
